[32a] ‘Method 2’, Art-Language, Vol. 4, No. 2, October, 1977, pp. 10-19 (pp. 10-14).

Method 2. 0.

The intuition that avant-garde art (and its service, avant-garde theorising) is in some deep and brutal way ungrammatical is connected to the idea that the correction of its logical/historical grammar, as a form of criticism, is, or involves, simplification. It is also connected to the idea that reification is another form of ‘simplification’ in this sense.

Someone might say it’s possible to set up a merely formal way of relating ungrammaticalness to reification; i. e., that something (some piece of writing, discourse, ‘teaching’, etc.) which is ungrammatical in respect of philosophical analysis would be turned into a lump because it would be that which could be neither true nor false, nor even many-valued in any coherent sense. Its ungrammaticalness would supervene any other valuation one might put upon it. In respect of a certain conservative philosophical analysis, non-sense would be an abomination.

But we’re not in a position to perform a positive reification of that kind inisofar as we’re not using the concept of ungrammaticalness in that sense. It’s not so much that the ungrammaticalness of bullshit determines ist subsequent reification, as that ungrammaticalness is a final metaphor for that which one has been forced at some point to reify.

The reification we’re talking about is something one’s forced into. Excessive ad-hominem writing, for example, presupposes reification in a sense, though in a less vexed sense than it would be understood by the sweltering left: it isn’t the reification that implies alienation in the direct or crystaline way that it does in (e.g.) Marxian social theory.

It is not a tendentious suggestion that the matter may well reduce to the observation that venality leads to ungrammaticalness. In discussing venality, one is doing rather more than criticising interests. One is saying that interests can occupy discourse such that an ontological shift is implied. Involved in a certain sort of reification is the contention that interest-infected discourse must face the implied ontological shift as a fait accompli. (And such reflectiveness – irony – tends to be incompatible with sustaining the credibility of the interest.)

In laymen’s (hacks) heavy-breathing about modern art, the question keeps coming up: “Are these people (‘artists’, etc.) conning the public, or can it be that they really mean it?” There’s always the possibility that both alternatives are true: that they really mean it and they’re conning the public, but that (their, i.e., the artists’, etc.) mystification of their activities is such that they themselves cannot realise it. They cannot say to themselves that they are conning the public, but this doesn’t mean that they are not doing it. What it means is that their principal energies are devoted to keeping the mystification going. This is where their true interest lies.

In raising the issue of ‘interest’, one is pushed into the examination of the character of a utilitarian category: R is not an excessive ‘interpretation’ of ‘interest’ to say that it means mystificatory venality. It has to mean that: it means that someone has a strategical and tactical take on his interests and therefore on that which is determined by those interests (e.g., his own discourse and writing). The content – the sense – of what Jeremy Avant-Garde is saying is determined by the fact that he can hide – that he has to hide – his interests. Its poker; i.e., it’s about guessing what someone else has in his hand. The whole business exists in a psychological stratosphere and not down on the table.

Can we establish terms of reference for discussion of a piece of discourse, writing or, etc. such that the claim that that discourse is ungrammatical is defensible as a strong rather than merely suggestive or metaphorical claim? Suppose that someone writes something which says, in his hegemonic and reduced-utilitarian interest, “This is a theoretical contribution to understanding the twentieth century.” (This is of course daft in itself.) In dealing at the start with the set of presuppositions, insofar as they involve an idealist, a footless methodological pseudo-ground, you set up a question mark ab initio. Is putting a grammatical operator on that question mark doing something profoundly methodological in itself?

Someone might say that there is involved a reduction to universal grammar, that the particular mendacious absurdity under review is an offence against universal grammar at its very methodological root. Anyone who did say that would have to be able to defend the philosophical presupposition of universal grammar. The presupposition can be defended (at least) as being a logically better idea than many of the others that have come up, and as being empirically strong. We circulate round the point that avant-garde discourse, ‘theory’, etc. is not about ‘understanding culture in the twentieth century’. It concerns itself with having a career ‘in’ culture; i.e., it’s an instrumentality in the interest in that career. Insofar as it is an instrumentality, its meaning contrasts abominably with its ‘extensional’ claim.

It might be objected that ‘interest’ is an illicit import – something in our beholding eye – that what we have noted is the merely contingent dislocation of extensional purport and intension. It is an illustration common in fifties’ philosophy that a man can aim to shoot a stag and subsequently find that ‘the stag’ was his granny. The objector might say that the problem is encapsulated in this illustration (i.e., that the avant-gardist can ‘mean well’ and still do what he does). One might reply by saying that this may be so, but only insofar as the ‘dislocation’ is grotesquely aggravated – viz. that the contradiction between the extensional purport of his work and its intensionality – its meaning – is such as to extend the practical range of the illustration inordinately. What is interesting about this is the extent to which practical considerations are reflected in the seemingly ‘theoretic’ observation that the dislocation is so severe that no-one can regard avant-garde (etc.) as a language – that it is something which belongs to historical narrative (i.e., it’s something which is recorded as having been said by someone), but which is not discourse at all.

The problem is that the distinction between discourse (think of this for the moment as ‘direct speech’) and the material of historical narrative (think of this as ‘indirect speech’) is intuitively clear, but only so long as you don’t look at them too carefully. Careful scrutiny will tend to have the minimal result that all of language – discourse, etc. – is seen as (or as tending to become) the material of historical narrative and as historical narrative itself. The alternative to facing this difficulty is the procurement of a series of footless abstractions which advocate (necessitate) an idealistic sense of ‘language’ and ‘theory’, etc.

Now, the authors of avant-garde theory and critisism (etc.) want to have it both ways: ‘dialectic’ themes serve their interests in idealistic ways. These authors have a propensity for shouting “foul” in the face of the upshot of the remark that there’s an aggravated lie or an intolerable practical contradiction in their work. The upshot, of course, will be that someone looks for that which determines or may determine the fact that their work is an aggravated lie.

To go back to the too-comfortable analogy of the man and the stag, one of the more obvious ways of sorting out what he was actually shooting at will be to find out whether he had a good reason for wanting his granny out of the way. This will be a part of your language if not of his. But the avantgarde intellectual (etc.) – i.e., vaguely-left avant garde – shouts “foul” when you do that. He says, “Look, this is my work. This is what you’re supposed to be looking at. This is the determined item. I am not the determined item.” He drives a wedge between the determinations upon the ‘work’ and his own private interests as producer of the ‘work’, and claims that it is illicit to draw attention to the determinations upon the producer. This is essentially aggravation of the lie and its dialectical consequences.

Another aspect of the avant-garde intellectual’s self-image suggests that he half-expects to be reified as absurdity. The ludicrous arrogance of not seeing his work as launched into a world in which it is subject to rebuttal or refutation is in a sense ameliorated, insofar as it is his dim recognition that he has produced an abomination, the proper fate of which is a purgatory of reification. He has an inkling of a dialectical result, but he’s efficient at hiding his self-contempt in positivist devices.

Insofar as the observation – that the claim to make a theoretical contribution to understanding is idealistic and methodologically footless – is veridical, what the avant-garde intellectual does is to aggravate the sense in which the extensional-intensional dislocation is unhistorical. An example might be found in someone who says, “This is a contribution to twentieth-century culture,” and writes essays that look like contributions to ‘twentieth-century culture’, when, in fact (and of course), the set of determinations on what is produced is not the very subtle and universally compresent relation between theoretic and external determinations, but rather a matter of subjecting the internal theoretic determinations to an external set of criteria, as it were an external ‘jurisprudence’ – the mother of fashion, subservience and related anxieties – and worse.

Everybody does this to a certain extent; we can’t just speak ‘pure’ a-historical theory. But at the same time one can look for a distinction between the sense that there is always a relation between external and internal determinations (say, determinations upon production and determinations within production) in any text (and that that relation cannot be excluded), and the sense that there is some point where a dislocation may be felt between the two. Is it that, where there may in fact be a dislocation (i.e., a sense of difficulty in saying something and meaning it), the conflation of the internal with the external determination is that which becomes a grammatical abomination? Such a conflation of one with the other would be (instantiated by a piece of writing which suggested) either seeing the world as reflecting one’s interests, or seeing one’s interests as reflecting the world; this, rather than seeing oneself as having a problem (which is what would happen where he experienced a sense of dislocation between external and internal determinations).

Now, this becomes very curious. There is a sense in which the highest grade of bourgeois ideology can be seen as profoundly anti-theoretical. There are certain reaches of bourgeois theory (or apparent theory) which are beset by the logical contradiction of utilitarianism: that it does not do what it says it does; that there is always, when someone is talking about an ‘interest’, this logical creature on his back, which is the fact that the utilitarian concept of an interest is in itself ... nonsense; that it derives from the idea that there could be various interests and that these interests could inhabit the world to each others’ mutual advantage and in harmony. Free enterprise as ecological systern – as asymptotic nature. The whole matter is fraught with nonsense (resulting, for example, in the confusion of ‘interest’ with ‘right’, the proscription of certain ‘interests’, etc., etc.).

The results come out the same whether we’re dealing with the historicity of a kind of non-sensifying function, which utilitarian political, etc. ideas will have to be, or whether we’re dealing with a much more close-to-the-text logical invalidation of something. Of course, we don’t have to be dealing with the one rather than the other; they overlap. And if this enquiry is not to be a kind of positivistic philosophical analysis, it’s very important that we bear that last remark in mind. At the same time, we don’t want to say, “OK, this bullshit has historicity,” and then spend all our time trying to find the end of the thread. If someone wants to untangle a ball of string, he has to start where the first knot is and go backwards; there’s no way he can trace it back to the beginning before he undoes it. And, anyway, the whole idea that one can sort out a single ‘strand’ and trace it back is to presuppose a theoretical and methodological monadology. The discourse – the production – of the avant-garde intellectual is something that becomes a gross lump. The set of determinations proper in enquiry or criticism are various scattered determinations upon that lump, and are not propitiously subject to isolation.

Let us return to a practical analogue of the semantical illustration and treat it as a clean ‘accident’: someone’s discourse is, “I’m aiming at a stag,” and they’re obviously not. If they did it often enough and kept hitting grannies, most people would simply start translating ‘stag’ as ‘granny’. The linguistic intuition involved is that the transformation would not make what they were saying ungrammatical; it would make it another language. Is the intuition always (or ever) reliable? What we’re doing here is assuming the best – the most transparent condition – where the argument would resolve into an argument about words.

We’re open to the belief that the man with the gun has a language in which ‘stag’ means ‘granny’, but we’re not here talking about conditions such that someone is describing what he’s doing; we’re talking rather about conditions such that someone is ‘demonstrating’ what he’s doing and describing it as something else. The ‘clean’ example leaves us with only the bare conditions of our sense of revulsion and horror. We are revolted and horrified. So, we’re outside that debate with its easy resolution. We’re obviously not just concerned to ‘understand’.

One suggestion might be that the sense in which we are using ‘translation’ does not map onto the sense in which it is normally understood. Having taken up a text by one of the avant-gardist creatures we’re talking about, we may translate it – that is to say, we may provide an account of what he has said which doesn’t say what he has said, even marginally. Now, he will say that it’s a perversion of what he said, and we’ll say that it’s a translation of what he said; i.e., we’ll say, “I am saying what you said,” and he will say, “No you’re not.” In fact, we wouldn’t be saying that we had made a translation in a strict sense. Obviously, we’d not be talking about non-scandalous ‘standard’ modalities or lexical equivalence, or any equivalence of both surface and deep structure, or of isomorphisms, etc. We would be talking of asymptotic relations in some structures however. If we’re saying, “It’s a translation,” we’re claiming that the grammatical transformation of the avant-garde text implies an ontological transformation.

To go back to the man and the stag, if we (regularly) just translated to make an overt ‘extensionality’ ‘fit’ an intensionality, there would in the end be some way in which we and the granny-slayer could act together. There would be some way in which we could socialise that translation so that we’d know what he was doing and he’d know what we knew.

But the actual circumstance we’re dealing with is one in which there is the possibility of such agreement. The sense of translation we have is translation manqué: translation which approaches the impossibility of alchemical transmutation. It’s of course not really as daft as that; some alchemists were by no means methodological primitives (and very few people can translate them). We can defend a functional transformation of the kind we’ve hinted at by saying, “There is something realistic about what we’ve done,” and further, “There is something ‘systematic’ in the way we’ve done it.” We’re saying that what is systematic in the way we’ve done it is given by the fact that the set of determinations on this (e. g., avant-garde) material is external to the proclaimed set of determinations upon it. We’ve unpicked the conflation and left bare again the problem which had been covered up. What we’ re doing is plugging in a supervening determination.

We’re close to an old and familiar situation: there is a piece of paper on which someone has written, “My job requires me to do so-and-so,” and we give it to someone else and we say, “Read this piece of paper in the light of the fact that what this man (etc.) really cares about is keeping his job.” We’re being asked, by the writers of avant-garde bullshit, by jobfixated bureaucrats, etc., to treat something as an illocutionary act of some kind, where it is not; e.g., saying, “Theory-and-practice, theory-and-practice, theory-and-practice,” is not talking about theory and practice; it’s securing an ideological job.

In the marriage ceremony, ‘I nn take thee nn ... , is not to be regarded felicitously as a proposition, or even a statement, but as an act, where the act is a function of the legality, the history, etc., the whole set of determinations which one draws into the institutional history of marriage. When someone performs the illocutionary act of marrying another by saying, “I Basil take thee Gloria,” is there a sense in which he ‘means’ it, or does the fact that it doesn’t really matter, save in legal extremity, whether he means it or not, constitute an augmentation or change on the prospect of ‘meaning’ beyond that captured by analytical philosophy? (We leave out the anthropological aspects, etc. here – for the moment.) There is a sense in which an illocutionary act could be constituted of formal nonsense and still produce appropriate results in the right circumstances. Presumably, the marriage service is nonsense, insofar as it involves God and all the rest of it, but you still end up married. ( ... And all the rest of the well known discussion ...

It is surely possible that in certain circumstances one could say to somebody, “What you have said you cannot possibly mean,” in the sense that one could not possibly mean all the things which he is required to say in (e.g.) the marriage ceremony. Now in what sense would that be a criticism?

Transformation to res results in something that cannot be a translation (there will be no intensional equivalents in it), because we are saying, “What you have said cannot be meant, but what we have said can; and there are certain dialectical relations between the two.” These will be determined relations and they will reflect reality. We are saying not just, “What you have said can’t be meant,” but also there is not a sense in which it can be meant, because its quasi-analytical character is such that the relationship between the dialectical set of determinations and the theoretical set of determinations is immanently abominable; i.e., worse-than-marginal with respect to all non-utilitarian valuations. Use is confused with mention and exhibition with meaning.

The pseudo-discourse of the avant-garde intellectual takes place against an involved background. This background is invoked en masse and ad hominem; that is, it is the authorised currency of the utilitarian prudence of the avant-garde intellectual. By reifying (e.g.) structuralism (for its own ends), the avant-garde acquires a dubious place in the hegemonic order. The working class will reify, e.g., structuralism (i.e., perceive it as ‘overdetermined’), and, of course, serve no utilitarian end. The venality of its reifications makes the avant garde the lumpens of hegemony.

It is natural to propose that the cognitive marginalia of a given discipline or practice will reflect reality in the ‘same’ way as do the external determinations on it (and vice versa), on pain of positive mystification. Conspicuously, the avant-garde fails to meet this proposal at all, drowning its possible cognitive marginalia in a sea of bourgeois good sense (pragmatism), which can neither mean knowing the laws and ‘respecting’ them, nor knowing them and breaking them to some non-utilitarian purpose.

It can be said of something grammatical that it is susceptible to a defensible analysis without making explicit fundamental reference to a context of usage (etc.). This is to say that in some important sense grammar transcends subjects. A listener or a reader can ascertain the ‘meaning’ of an ungrammatical locution, of course, by making reference to a set of external determinations, including his ‘own’; he could say he ‘understood’ it, but he’d mean that he understood it (e. g.) behaviouristically or historically or, etc. At the extreme he would indeed be forced to see it as a piece of behaviour, and as discourse only in terms of a cognitive abstraction of his own devising: one might say that the dog is ‘saying something’ when he wags his tail, but that wouldn’t commit anyone to the belief that cognitive conversation with the animal was a possibility.

We can’t do without this behaviouristic sense of grammar, notwithstanding the predations of Verstehen, etc. Remember, the sense of ‘ungrammatical’ involved is extreme, insofar as the bourgeois good sense of the avant garde has already prohibited cognitive enquiry such that one can only use an extenuated sense of direct discourse with regard to them. One can never internalise what an avant-gardist says; we can only say ‘he says’, put it all between quotation marks and then deal with it, post factum, as a lump, as something which has already been put into a circumstance such that its cognitive value cannot be presupposed. It is only contingently possessed of any cognitive content.

There is a difference between someone’s saying, “Theory and practice,” as a utilitarian function, and someone’s saying, “Theory and practice,” as a dialectical function. There is no non-obliquely cognitive sense in which the former can be internalised, whereas the latter is cognitively negotiable - i.e., it is not an accidental utility. Avant-garde discourse reduces, in a sense, to an iterated “Bleah” – where the only function of “Bleah” is to get a pat on the head from the ruling class.

One can say that at one level of operation it is a matter of scrutiny, of analysis, as to whether a given locution is grammatical or not; but if at another level one can say that that locution is only ascertainable through the very tact? (or fact) of putting it into inverted commas, then he immediately invokes the external non-grammatical, non-cognitive condition in any case. He has fixed the level of discourse to “Jeremy Avant Garde says ‘Bleah’.” The original locution only becomes grammatical by virtue of its being put into quotes and becoming part of a predicate; it has no ‘directness’ as speech and has to be contextualised in the direct speech of others. It is only assimilable into a defensible grammar as a reified lump or as a fragment of a reified lump. This would, of course, not be odious in most circumstances, as indirect speech is logically and dialectically counterpoised with direct discourse. But how would it be if there were no direct occurrences? With the avant garde there are none.

Method 3. 0.

To examine or attempt criticism of the vagrant, sub-analysable half-truth – the social and professional currency of ideological opportunism – is obviously a waste of time, anti-practical, dislocated and irrelevant. What is significant about these ideological expropriations isn’t just that they are predicated upon peer-group metaphysics (etc.), but that the congeries of homeless fragments of pretension get disseminated and constitute some kind of quasi-developmental future.

The methodological adequacy of criticism is often associated with an in principle ‘reductionism’. This reductionism remains ‘in principle’ in the sense that it may be no more than a direction of analysis, not a fact in it. If analysis of bullshit is required, then logic and historical materialism may provide some of the tools. Whether or not this implies a ‘reductionism’ is by no means clear. Is ‘reductionism’ the ‘reduction’ of rubbish to a set of principiated sentences or does ‘reduction’ mean the (possibly immanent) simplification of rubbish? These are not unoblique alternatives of course. They overlap at least – or we might say their boundaries are coincident at some point.

It seems that ‘reductionism’ is unavoidable in criticism of the illocutionary absurdity of vagrant sub-dialectic pretension. The half-truth is, only in a weak sense, related internally to another half-truth – the system is simply instantiated by this half-truth ‘association’. Bullshit reduces to historical action of a sort. The avant-garde cultural excrescence, whether it be ‘explanation’, ‘exposition’, ‘analysis’, or, etc., must reduce to a pale history – it is nothing else. Its internal debate is empty. This fact contributes the sense of ‘reduce’. The reductionism envisaged is, therefore, a route to a practical holism (cf. Art-Language, Volume 4, Number 1). It is a holism in the sense that one wants to recognise the complexity of a system which envelopes or contains just the sort of material that is published in October, say. This material has a kind of cutaneous complexity-in-itself, though; the question of ‘reduction’ is still vexed.

It isn’t easy to distinguish word from object when you are dealing with the dialectical half-truth (that’s a kind description). To say, “One is dealing with a theory and not an” (in criticism) is, we would hazard, an historical mistake in this connection. However, we are trying to say that while bullshit reduces (must reduce) to something like ‘history’ this is no actual simplification. The suggestion is rather that bullshit (half-truth peddling, etc.) reduces to complexity (history).

In general, reductionism is a bias toward theoretical monism. One might add that it is a hypertheoretical monism, and one might further add that this puts the claim to reductivity up against a contradiction: viz. that reduction denies complexity. Hence the claim that reduction focusses the fact of complexity cannot be true. But maybe this isn’t contradictory, maybe it is just a matter of contrast of emphasis.

In dealing with contradiction there is going to be a plurality of large, small, middle-sized theories and models. However, we want to suggest that bullshit is indivisible, not in the sense that all falsehoods are equivalent, but in the sense that its complexity is an ‘external’ modality. Among (importantly among) these ‘external’ modalities is stopping avant-garde bullshit – silencing it in some way. The means of silencing it will be some further elaboration of it (or complexity).

This is the dialectical equivalent of saying that anger plus ensuing action (or related actions) is a modality which properly supersedes, or rather, displaces, epistemological considerations. Thus the ‘complexity’ of bullshit will be the number of theories and other activities which overlap it in certain unclear ways. That is, these other activities partially supplement and partially ‘contradict’ one another in explaining (demystifying) and interacting with (acting on?) bullshit at a number of levels of description and organisation.

A vulgar reductionism on our part would make one treat this plurality as derivative from one primary theory (e.g., saying that it all just follows from and is a piece in the light of the decline of Capitalism in the West, or some such balls). This means there is no concern with the ontology (etc.), of theories and worlds. All questions about their (the worlds’) relationship to one another tend to be overlooked on the supposition that all can be (or will be) sorted out when their relationships to a reducing theory and practice are determined.

Embarassing or no, we must work with a plurality of incompletable (or incompletely articulated) and partially – or totally – contradictory theories (and practices, etc.). But this not in an interdisciplining-all-over-the-place sense. We had better get on with the job or be ourselves guilty of idealism. The only alternative we have conduces either to the illicit generalisation of the structuralist Meccano (Erector) set or to a policy that must eventually deify the state or ‘a leadership’.

The reification of bullshit, the (pre-)reductionist elaboration of anaytical practices and the post-reductive reification of bullshit, are of significance insofar as we do have – must have – intuitions of social and historical complexity. We have to have such intuitions – or join the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Method 3. 1.

We have suggested that ideological opportunism, avant-garde art and culture are indivisible. The historio-eidetic experience of ‘indivisibility’ does not import (ludicrous) psychologism into an analysis which opposes half-clever bullshitting. This doesn’t mean, of course, that all ‘falsehoods’ and dialectical half-truths (and utilitarian functions) are equivalent. These half-truths will contribute (in a variety of indirect existences) to an historical activity which meets and begs the (historical) need for analysis.

The important point is, however, that although the extreme marginality of avant-garde grammar may be anticipated and encouraged, it is a scandalous and, in some ways, intractable ideological determinant of practical contradictions.

Criticism of the vagrant, sub-analysable half-truth can easily become dislocated – or, simply, irrelevant. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t just the case that Lefty’s ideological expropriation is a meaningless burbling – it also gives rise to some consideration of its hegemonic function (its purely hegemonic function). The conjecture is therefore that it has some sort of ‘meaning’. ‘Criticism’, in the half-awake world of culture is, of course, seldom nomothetically rigorous. A theoretic rigour must, however, exist as a vector in criticism, against the homeless fragments of self-serving chatter.

Lets think about the quality: when confronted by a collection of abstractions, we postulate that there’s a world of classes without (problematic, i.e., real) members, and that such an assembly must be only tautomerically ordered. The objectivity of criticism will not depend upon the sense of participation in a common, overdetermined (oh, yes) domain of discourse so necessary to intellectuals. Bourgeois methodological individualism is an ‘enforcement’ of psychologistical necessity which ignores the practical bases of any authentically social project. In the context of real class struggle, the cultured intellectual half-truth refers to nothing at all - except an uplifting mediation on ‘realism’, whose only dialectical ingredient is that it is the property and instrumentality of the ruling class.

In a way, reductionism plays an important part in criticism: it objectifies rather than relativises our (sectional) position. This form of in-principle reductionism must be a condition not only of methodological adequacy of criticism, but it also must be a possibility of practical objection. The odd thing is that the ontological simplicity (or the lack of problematicness) in preventing the non-negation which is the avant garde’s negation is as extreme for us (as people who know the trick directly) as it would be for the non-bourgeois in dealing with the accidental negations of the educated quality. They both get reified, have to get reified. Any ensuing class analysis will continue as a vector of class socialisation.

It might be objected that most of the argument over degrees of internal or external complexity in respect to avant-garde ‘intellectualism’ as analysis is, or can be, sharply focussed. This implies that the avant garde, in striking postures over its own logical-ontological upshots, is in important ways just idle. “A reductionism of some sort is unavoidable in the criticism of the illocutionary absurdity of vagrant sub-dialectic pretension. A half-truth is only in a very weak sense internally related to another half-truth.” A ‘systematicness’ in external (inter-) relations can be considered not only as synthesised ‘accident’, but as a function of our reductionist critique on that systematicness. This is not circular.

The historical taxonomy of the Authentic Paris Fashion (avant-garde culture, etc.) is straightforward enough reduction. This taxonomy would be a partial analysis such that the method is not itself in the domain of that analysed. It is analysis of ‘analysis’ such that the former is not in the domain of the latter. The objectification or reification of avant-garde culture and criticism (as distinct from Authentic Paris Fashion) will be revised, however, in the light of the occasionally varying ontological purport (character) of that culture, etc., and contrasted with the self-determining critique and reductionist treatment which class contempt necessitates.

In a way, the Authentic Paris Fashion is not prima facie our class problem. It is a basic or working-class problem, prima facie. This is to say that our methodological problems may well remain compact to bourgeois theorising or oblique in relation to a view of hegemony proposed by the working class. Authentic Paris Fashion is quite like ‘theory’, for example. We can’t make any headway with the historical typification of an unconstitutive complex (sic) of external valuations if this ‘complex’ is to have only a semantical life. “To say that one is dealing in criticism with a theory and not an object is an historical mistake.” It isn’t easy (it’s even silly) to distinguish word from object when you are dealing with the ‘dialectical’ halftruth. But it is easy to commit a phenomenological mystification by granting the privilege of its actual mystification to that which has no substantial (and, in reflection, explicit) heir-lines (dialectical historicity).

The semantic absurdity of the cultural avant garde and of any iteration of its self-assured grown-up babbling is to be treated only insofar as one reduces it to an internal complexity (history). It is a fragment of social absurdity. There are a lot of bourgeois revisions against this last suggestion which are based on the idea that speculative bureaucracy is better than trying to cope with the realism of historical materialism. The culture and criticism of the avant garde makes historical reductionism particularly simple. Revisions, notwithstanding (un)intelligibility, can be reduced a priori so as to be included in an elaborated theoretical monism (cf. Art-Language, Volume 4, Number 1). There is some complexity in the valuation that something is unintelligible in an aggravated sense: there is a monistic margin which objectifies (reifies) that which is unintelligible in this aggravated sense. This complexity is of some importance when it is recognised that, for example, those ‘explanatory’ (‘analytical’ (etc.)) absurdities expropriated and reified (actually ‘made unintelligible’) by the avant garde might in its absence present nasty contradictions in any practical-realistic projects in the superstructure. People will reify the superstructurally ‘intelligible’ Authentic Paris Fashion – in realising its unintelligibility. Unless bourgeois realists can reify bourgeois idealists in specific (aggravated) circumstances, then the former will have to be reified by the working class exactly as the latter are.

The dialectically homeless (external determination) is enveloped in the complexity of aggravated unintelligibility as it envisages a practical holism. This ‘holism’ is historically ‘systematic’ but does not itself constitute any sort of system. Quasi-propositional, formal or theoretic valuations do have a (faded) historical life, but as a ‘set of sentences’ they cannot be detached from objectifying considerations: neither they nor we occupy anything like a noetic space. There isn’t such a ‘thing’ as a privileged space of abstract mediation. Valuations which are articulate ‘within’ the ideological index are at some point in criticism explicit functions of class dysfunction.

From a practical holistic class point of view, Authentic Paris Fashions can be reduced to a dialectical absurdity. Avant-garde ‘Authentic Paris Fashions’ can be reduced to a formal and a dialectical absurdity. This latter observation is a formal (?) provision for the existence of some sort of meaning-function in relation to contradiction. In general, it will be the only methodologically adequate way (meaning) we can have. The avant garde is an ideological abomination: practical-utilitarian and not ideological normativity. Oblique contradictions (i.e., contradictions not tied up to reductive discourse) find their own status as the ‘meaning’ of meaningless junk. It certainly would be silly and certainly not a part of analysis or criticism to say that the meaninglessness is entirely opaque. The oblique contradictions are within those postulated and suffered at the social base.

We face a plenum of contradictions and meaninglessness. It is not, however, the undifferentiated world of ‘overdetermination’ ... everything’s overdetermined says a piping and secretive voice. The secret the voice knows is devoid of logical or immanent connectedness.

Method 3. 2.

A critique of actions (in relation to critique of ideological opportunism) will have to have the effect of replacing the surface complexity (e. g., the invocation of the chains, the intervals and the lattices of managerial, academic, bureaucratic procedures or ‘obligations’) with a straightforward account of the relations of determination borne in a given ideological fragment or set of such. For example, where X says, “My job requires me to ... ,“ Y might arrive at a more straightforward paraphrase of the ensuing bullshit if he prefaced it with a sentence to the effect that X is concerned above all with keeping his job.

‘Motivation’ has a psychological or psychologistic penumbra. If one says, however, that to expose motivation is often to simplify, one is not committing an illicit psychologism with respect to the methodological perturbations of critique. What would have been regarded as illicit ‘psychologism’ (by the dry sticks of terribly rigorous analyse) isn’t dismissable because someone calls it by a naughty name. This is to assert that complexity qua proliferating structure is nothing – is doing nothing – in the opaque faces of complexity.

Most criticism in culture (sic) is just a further disordered subdivision of a complexity insofar as it is participatory pseudo-dialogue without internal (assertoric) necessity. ‘Structure’ is only to be found in the fake exchange or swap of quasi-grammatical compilation. Now, this last remark sinks matters into absurdity by inviting a charge that an apparently methodological remark is no more than a backtrack from a petitio principii. Criticism in culture is subject to ontological closure. Its dialogic detail accelerates away from ‘reality’. ‘Criticism’ that would be recognized as such in most posh journals is impossible. Its objects are not there even as modalities. The methodological point here is that logical coherence and ‘structural’ fruitfulness, even systematicness, would secure no more than a formal rigour for cultural debate and, for that matter, cultural theory. Formal rigour is just that. (Formality without rigour is another world – the two spaces have entirely different constituents.)

Substantive criticism of any kind will be indexed to something real and to something methodologically basic (which may be the same thing). It will be the demystification (simplification) of an area of putative ‘mediation’ between base and superstructure. It will also be more. It will start from the premise that cultural peregrinations are or impinge upon history conceived dialectically. One of the most fundamental critical questions will be the correct identification of (or location of) the implicature of the cultural excrescence conceived and shown to be action of a particularly atrocious kind. Such identification is not too far from praxis, practice, etc. and their dialectical families.

An argument of which criticism is a function may be to reveal that certain forms of action are inherently and offensively unrealistic (“My job requires me to ... etc. ...“). The metaphysic of self-contemplation (e.g., self-serving fixations upon purely bureaucratic notions of obligation) is not only repulsive, it is the grossest of dialectic errors. This, if and only if dialectic is not conceived trivially as relativised doxastic technique. The historical horror of self-contemplation is political. It isn’t that it might be abominably utilitarian, it is rather that it is proto-fascist (you might say ‘formally fascist’), a thinly populated (or empty) space – a technique – waiting to be filled (to be appropriated) by the more monstrous ambitions of others – by a magic-making junta. The surrender of individual judgments and realism, in the interest of self-identification with a world of merely formal technical obligations, is a prerequisite for the development of totalitarian institutions.

Where a bit of cultural literature or some other cultural or ‘educational’ fragment is almost entirely predictable (either as bureaucracy or as an internalisation of the bureaucratic aspect of – propitiously – a ‘cultural’ role), there is no possibility of assigning it a complexity anywhere save at the surface of its bureaucratic body.

Method 3. 3.

Emil Nolde meets some admirers

The historical difference between two ideological excrescences (whether within an identity, a homomorphism or, etc.) will often be discernible as (or in) one dialectical (or logical) part or aspect per million: ‘Volkischeness’ has, so to speak, a history. It’s too simple to chatter on about ideas ‘going bad’ (as if in a world of absolute becoming), and say that the Volkische Blud und Boden is immanently sinister just because it was ‘sinister’ in the hands of (the head of) Alfred Rosenberg et alia – as if the transformation were simple.

The above remark is no doubt true, but it is constructivistic or, rather, it invites the perpetuation of a search for particles or relations and forces no doubt far beyond real necessity. That is an intolerable perpetuation, and the reason it’s intolerable is that it obscures the ontological complexity of the problem. At a certain point, analysis and criticism will vanish into a self-proliferating idealism (an anti-realism) unless some reification is made. It is not just a matter of degree (determined or mediated by various aims and purposes or supervening moral, etc. determinations) that Volkische-ness, Blud und Boden (as dialectical or ideological history) has everything put into it or taken away from it by Nazism such that internal ‘criticism’ of Rosenberg is impossible. This is more or less true, but it does not depend for its truth upon the unspeakableness, the horrorshock of Nazism, or the repulsive acts committed is its name. It is a methodological remark or it is idealism. It is a means of approach or a means of singling out that which is to be approached, not just the horrorshock that supervenes. To say that it’s methodological is to say that there are non-idealistic and better-than-phenomenological reasons for rejecting debate with Rosenberg and, we may say, most of the (later) fools who are his propitious heirs, bits of his base fallen off. If the lid’s firmly on Rosenberg, they can’t expect to be heard as anything but the echoes from the dustbin.

Method 3. 4.

The self-contemplating fools of avant-garde fake intellectualism continue to ramble in the direction of the careers they’ve promised themselves. Their cultural production has immanent inverted commas – it is no direct discourse. At first articulation, this is obvious.

What sort of indirect life has ‘discourse’ with the bizarre illocutionary ‘force’ that it just be ‘quoted’, counted, for textual (etc.) issue to be an historical lump, to be what you (the artist-intellectual) said? This is illocutionary force of an entirely utilitarian kind. Where with the vaunted ‘theory’?

Theory is nothing like this. It never has been. For the avant-garde intellectual it’s not, “I’m glad I said that ‘...’,” nor even, “‘…’ is consistent with my career aspirations.” Rather it’s a dog’s breakfast of modalities to ideological-cultural input. It’s just currency; the modalities are never explicit; they are, however, immanently compresent.

The variables determining the formalisms of an intellectual manière are not themselves formal. The game is, in fact, rhetoric – but a formaloid rhetoric incapable of self-scrutiny, let alone self-criticism. This is the idle performance of an almost-language in an almost-’situation’ (sic).

Avant-gardism is socially disingenuous cookery: the enterprise of cheap metaphysics is, a fortiori, cheap (prudential) unrealism. This remark can be augmented by saying that the enterprise is only principiated by those recipes which a community of quacks use to shape their behaviour-locale – the anxious promise of their careers. That they cook (with) the historical books is almost literally true. Avant-garde logic will always be a practical function of the enthymeme of the ‘serving suggestion’ to anyone unprepared or unwilling to ‘elaborate’ or to parrot the recipe(s) – except that avant-gardism is to put nothing in the packet.

Anxious self-quotation performs in the absence of a veridical initial direct occurrence. This signals submission to cultural behaviourism with intricate (complex) knobs on. This kind of discourse sets a locution in a sub-historical counterfactual – the opportunist counterfactual: “If I didn’t say something like this, I’d be overlooked by those who can learn and internalise members of its family.” The differentiae of the family are clear(-ish) to anyone. But the learning (the culture) reduces to epistemological nihilism: e.g., “Now I know how to go on,” is no more than, ‘I can successfully extrapolate the manierès of supervising and eating lunch to the manierès of supervising and eating dinner.” There is a sense in which something of the avant garde as meaning must be understood, but whatever it may be will not be anthropological speculation – will not be that easy on analysis.

It’s simple to see why at one time, “Dennis Amiss will play for England for the next ten years even if he craps himself and scores nought in every innings,” was true with the inexorability of a law of nature. It is also simple to see that the reasons for this were at the margins of cricket; some might even say that these reasons had nothing to do with cricket. Others might say that it had everything to do with cricket as culture; and this observation isn’t really quarrelsome; perhaps we should say ‘the game of cricket’.

It isn’t as simple in ‘culture’. Bullshitting is an analytic requirement for that game. The high cultural excrescence is highly compact (integrating, in a sense). The ‘game’ in high-cultural not-quite-society is playing as badly and as cowardly as Dennis Amiss. “No ball is ever bowled toward which Dennis Amiss doesn’t know how to behave,” is propitiously cultural; that he is a lousy batsman is about cricket (and a ‘cultural’ valuation). It is also (or alternatively) a fact.

The enactment and the elaboration of a code of manière is not theorising. But manières are usually maximal – and yet they are transformable (the pathology of idiocy will have to take this into account). The substantive point is that avant-garde maunderings are accelerated functions approaching empty manières. Participatory debate would be to approach manières non-cognitively. Analysis will seek and (given their historical provenance) excoriate the conditions and modalities of manières.

There is still more to be said ex hypothesi, and it is not that picturesque: mystification (which is just what the above described practice is) is a complex abomination. There is no way that one can rest on form and content – that is, assimilate absurdities and the like with that distinction as ceteris paribus. The quotation marks which venality necessitates indicate illicit modalisation, a weak sample space proclaiming that its contents include (comprise) the Euclidean infinite. The modalisation is usually intermediate between direct and indirect occurrence. Illicit or not, the modalisation determines what is to be recognised as the assertoric (or, etc. ... what?) content of the writing and arting we’re considering.

Now for the unpicturesque bit. Although an avant-gardist’s locution, say “Constructivism is...,” is not direct “Constructivism is…” (the avant-gardist’s locution is modalised in a strange self-dislocating way – direct discourse is, of course, not so modalised), these locutions can occasionally be orthographically congruent (this is grudging but unavoidable).

Avant-garde modalisation is an index. Dissembling can’t be turned into truth by the addition of quotation marks. However, if we put a whole avant-garde text into quotation marks, we can get our analysis on the right footing. The quotation marks are just grammatical indicators of the index (i.e., what the index necessitates), notwithstanding that there is no implicature from index to inverted commas.

Method 3. 5.

The utilitarian rationality of the avant garde: a picturesgue hypothesis

The avant garde has a wilting resemblance to a bureaucracy. The resemblance is historical, analytical and practical. Everybody knows this. But the resemblance should be explored.

Jeremy Avant Garde has a plenum of problems: he can neither say what he means, nor mean what he says. The former difficulty neither balances out the latter in a schematic way nor vice versa. The question is immediately raised whether or not the plenum of problems is ‘real’ to Jeremy – that is, could he ‘experience’ the plenum of problems (‘the problem’ for short) such that anyone but he could call it ‘a problem’ and still want to mean anything at all? This question is, as it were, transitive, as Jeremy has in general a practical strategy for avoiding it: he lets his utilitarian rationality do the work; his interests and aspirations (desires, etc.) sort it out for him. These make a match for him between his sense of historical or deontic (or, etc.) constraint and these interests, desires, etc., insofar as these interests, desires, etc. are reflected in his discourse – are the only semiological substantives in his discourse.

This still doesn’t answer the question (insofar as it is paradigmatic) in its general guise: viz. “Does Jeremy Avant Garde have any problems at all?”

It is possible to form a picture of utilitarian-liberal rationality (bourgeois rationality) and reasonableness which will show that the avant-garde and the cultural (and, e.g., educational) bureaucracy are compact with respect to determinations – are identical twins. This will involve forming a picture of utilitarian rationality (and avant-garde rationality) as that which mediates (in a sense) between the pragmatic or prudential (venal) determinations of (or on) discourse on the one hand and, on the other, the ‘transcendent’ or dialectical determinations. The mediation functions on behalf of those who seek the appearance which a) is enough for their purposes and b) can only be appearance – as the implied categories are themselves mystificatory of a perfect ‘fit’ between the two, that is, conjure a positivist rather than dialectical sense of ‘determination’, reason, cause, etc.

The apparently odd nomenclature which the picture will involve is a consequence of the practical entrenchment of the utilitarian myth and its essential services, appetites, desires, interests. ‘Interests’, etc. are intensional categories treated by us ‘indirectly’ (phlogiston has a curious grammatical existence analogous in some ways to these categories). Some descendant of antique ethical categories (generalisations about ‘man’, etc.) will have to be faced insofar as a natural upshot of analysing avant-garde discourse is the assertion that the element of venality in avant-garde bullshit is an objective and not elliptical property. That is, the bullshit of the avant garde does not just follow from the fact that there are bullshitters. The valuation that avant-garde bullshit and its sibling, bureaucratic bullshit, transparently have qualities and purposes in common (i.e., that they have a consistent class character) is partly the assertion that avant-gardism and bureaucracy are interconnected in respect of utilitarian rationality, and that this type of rationality reduces in some important respects to an aspect of behaviour. It does not, of course, reduce to behaviour as such – but it’s hard to say ‘principle of behaviour’, as there is a sense in which it could principiate nothing. (Perhaps the reason why so many hamstrung heads of department in art schools – and many teachers – seem so palpably caricaturable is that they demonstrate so clearly the lamer features of avant-garde behaviour and bureaucratic behaviour simultaneously.)

How can Jeremy Avant Garde so confidently leave it to his utilitarian rationality to sort out (his) pseudo-problem? His rationality inures him to the sense of absurdity or ‘exposure’ that would otherwise ensue as a consequence of his being subject to scrutiny. One might conjecture that he does have the intuition not only that he does reify, but also that it is his propitious fate to be reified. It could be that Jeremy doesn’t have to care: reification is a ‘secure job’, and a ‘secure job’ is reification: “This is Mr. So-and-So, the Personnel Manager; This is Mr. So-and-So, the Artist; This is Mr. So-and-So, the Spitting Radical and Enemy of the Middle Classes.” Life without irony is no doubt a feasible dream on the left, but bourgeois life without irony is entirely intolerable.

In the end, the dialectic of meaning (which has at its margins the aspect of teleology and universal grammar) is lost in the miasma of meaning as the instrument of utilitarian rationality. As in pornographic fantasy (as distinct from pornographie product), where all becomes possible in the endless pursuit of ‘ends’ necessarily incapable of fulfilment, the ‘pursuit’ becomes self-fulfilling – and the actual ends a ludicrous idealisation. In the idealised pursuit of utilitarian ends nobody is harmed. Individual actions in the pursuit of pornographic fantasy are essentially meaningless, save as forms of behaviour – as fragments of scenarios in a ‘drama’ which has to have no authentic spectators; there can be no-one external to the action, no-one can escape implication, either actively or as passive objects.

There is no irony in pornography. Consider utilitarianism as pornography: was De Sade utilitarian and only trivially the phenomenological innovator of educated (sic) opinion? The sense of second-rate myth persists. The sense persists of the offensiveness of a milieu such that the only proclaimed (or faced) ‘realism’ is an injunction against those who look like interfering in the pursuits of utilitarian rationality, delivered by those who have just about read Marcuse. The utilitarian call to realism is an injunction against social detall, against practice, an injunction against history.

Importantly, it is a class-originated injunction against those who do, in fact, stand distant from the drama. The avant-garde ‘intellectual’, constituting and intending the world in a reification, pities and ultimately hates those who must reify him in any non-idealist aspect of their activity.

In reifying the avant-garde intellectual and the bureaucrat, we reify those who have, in a sense, already striven to place themselves outside reality, in a mystification outside the dialectical complexity of determination. They have masked their determined need in a plea that one ‘stick to the text’ (etc.), masked the fact that the determined need stifles all dialectic reality in supervening all other determinations upon their ‘practice’. The mystification can depend upon immunity from destruction because the ‘actual’ relations of determination (internal needs, interests, etc.) are, according to utilitarian rationality, eminently reasonable. The ultra-positivist squeak, ‘stick to the text’, etc., occurs of course only as a ‘defence’ against realistic criticism. Uncritical consumption will never force this defence insofar as it must enjoy a structural interest in the implied mystification. It does stick to the text.

This sense of reasonableness is (a function of) an idealisation to the effect that non-utilitarian determinations only reflect and generalise needs, powers and interests. Utilitarian rationality is, it might be suggested, a scheme which sets up the illusion of an isomorphism or even an equivalence between utilitarian (prudential?) ‘determinations’ (i.e., fake or at least dubious determinations) and (e.g.) deontic determinations, so as to appear as the supervening determination. The illusion is, of course, only a function of utilitarian ‘determination’ (and the avant garde can’t stop itself talking about consciousness).

The anxieties of the (necessarily) neurotic bourgeois in pursuit of utilitarian fulfilment are thus mapped onto ‘the world’ as global features of ‘conscience’ (even ‘consciousness’). The whole mess goes squelching on, agglomerating ‘concerns’ and proliferating methodologies and structuralisms over the lives of a class (or classes) not finding it too difficult to have better things in mind.

The most purposeful weapon of the avant-garde intellectual with his fixation upon ‘the media’ (a fixation now characteristically entrenched by investment in semiology) is that he is in an apparently privileged position to publicise (sic) and to ‘defend’ the identification of features of his own ideological spectrum as ontology – i.e., as features of the ontological spectrum. He has no ‘informal’ or natural opposition because no-one else has a real reason to want to form such identifications (and this notwithstanding the protests of social anthropologists, or misinterpreters of N. R. Hanson).

A sub-class of petty tyrants, not so much war-like as men of monstrous common-sense, they will secure their propitious ‘place in history’ only negatively. Someone might object that recognisable class opposition to the avant garde would be something odious and, in any case, unnecessary. The avant garde is ideologically vagrant. This is a powerful objection. It can be argued that the particular detail of (or in relation to) ideology composed by the avant garde is properly obliterated within its bourgeois location insofar as it stifles the historical agency of the bourgeoisie in an intolerable mystification of its possible relationship (obliquity) with the working class. (With respect to grand bourgeois hegemony, the situation is different.)

Method 3. 6.

For the individual bourgeois, social rationality is propagandised as the maximisation of individual satisfactions and powers. For the individual member of the working class, social rationality is propagandised as the desire for ‘self-betterment’ (etc.), where ‘better’ is the greater appropriation of utilities and (marginally) greater potential for using and developing his powers.

The rationality of the bourgeoisie as a class can only be expressed in terms of a schematic idealisation of the utilitarian-liberal illogic, such that everyone can achieve the maximisation of his individual satisfactions or utilities and powers. These may be lumped together as ‘interests’. Everyone maximises his interests equitably and nobody gets hurt in the process (at least, nobody gets hurt who counts as somebody).

The historical potential (projectivity?) of the interests of the bourgeois class is thus elliptical (i.e., historically negative). The idealism presupposes in its apologetics the continued hegemony of the bourgeoisie; the maximisation of the pursuit of his ‘interests’ by the individual bourgeois is in the interests of his class conceived as a whole.

The ‘interests’ of the working class as a class are disjoint from this violence and absurdity: the maximisation of the pursuit of individual ‘interests’ of members of the working class is seen, in standard socialist theorising, as disqualifying him (insofar as he is in pursuit of interests or insofar as he maximises interests) from contributing to the fulfilment of the real interests of his class as a whole. Thus he is, in the pursuit of his (utilitarian-liberal) interests, in conflict with the real interests of his class conceived as a whole.

If in utilitarian-liberal rationality (or pluralist rationality), ‘interest’ is, as we have suggested, a function mediating (or appearing to mediate) between utilitarian (fake) determinations and dialectical and theoretical determinations, then it might be said that maximisation of his (utilitarian-liberal) interests for the individual bourgeois entails the alleviation (or the illusion of the alleviation) of the contradiction between the actual expression of his interests and history. We conceive of ‘interests’ as what the individual bourgeois can ‘say’ and also mean – in the case of the avant garde ‘indirectly’, ‘directly’ in the case of other bourgeois. ‘History’ we here conceive as a function of a non-arbitrary relation between extension and intension in grammar and meaning – i.e., the reality of what can be said and meant.

The credibility of the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class depends upon a validation of the fallacy that a universally defensible general sense of the relation between extension and intension (history) can be achieved by the mere multiplication or aggregation of interests conceived as intensions. Could anything more clearly instantiate the perversion of ‘meaning’, it might be asked?

If what one has to say presupposes the possibility that any item of discourse may be subject to an ontological shift (a shift which has its origin in the class – social-historical – circumstances in which it is understood), then there is some basis for a ‘continuity of interests’ in history. But the reverse doesn’t apply: if the individual bourgeois presupposes that his own history can be somehow decided by what he says (cutaneously) about it, then he is a self-deluded bullshitter, approaching avant-garde disease. The point here is that the ideologically tidy bourgeois and the ideologically tidy intellectual bourgeois can, on occasion (and when he’s not engaged in business directly), within his own class contemplate an ontological shift to secure meaningfulness for his discourse. But the contemplation of such a shift has its roots in the very existence of the bourgeois class and is merely a matter of emphasis and alleviation as between utilitarian and liberal interests.

The continuity of interests for the bourgeois is in the low-grade mystification that the making of the ontological shift must have its root in a class which has not internalised bourgeois ideology. This may be a better way of saying the old determinist saw so beloved of brand new Marxist-Leninist-Mao-Tse-Tung-Enver-Hoxa-Thought-non-provokers (guess, it’s easy).

We are saying, in short, that the bourgeois sense of ontology is compact to (in) bourgeois ideology. This is the ontological blindness of the bourgeois, the heir of, or the parent of, positivism. The necessity of the shift (transformation) is in no sense immanent to the bourgeois who has all the filigree of theory and positivism at his disposal ... but he doesn’t pretend to be opposed to the shift. The avant-gardist pretends (believes) that he has transcended all ontological transformation in his discourse. He pretends (believes) that his discourse has direct meaning, and yet somehow manages to pursue his interests as tidily as any tidy bourgeois. Is this the due to the absurdity of Dada and Surrealism?

A distinguishing feature of the avant-garde intellectual’s (etc.) grease paint is its credibility. You can, so to speak, calculate the avant garde from (e.g.) One Dimensional Man and other Rive-Gauche-paperback-translated-into-almost-English journalistic idealism (plus the quasi-methodological trim expressed (sic) as the interface of the market and bureaucracy). Credibility is always a function of weak hypotheses – that is, hypotheses whose supervention is within the space of a positivist problematic. The avant garde is the white-collar engineer of culture, not in the strong sense that it makes determinedly pedestrian things happen, but rather methodologically: it proselytises the weakest possible dis-confirmatory (sic) relations and yet remains subject to the most radical practical disconfirmation.

The avant-gardist’s life (and the bourgeois bureaucrat’s life) is, however, the life of the box-girder engineer’s sales-staff: he may be unaware that the (‘intellectual’) fashions he adopts are bound to be supervened. More importantly, he doesn’t have any way of noticing (or caring) so long as they are ‘practical’ instruments of his pluralistically warranted interest. There is no indication that learning, save lumpen prudence, is going on.

The suggestion is that there is a dialectical complex in which the avant-garde intellectual is the pale (i.e., formal) equivalent of a class traitor in that he is the most aggravated form of negative normativity. Vagrant scholarship is one thing; turning its arbitrary margins into ‘class consciousness’ is another. Anomie was never so close to alienation.

Method 3. 7.

The absurdity, arbitrariness and venality with which the structuralist-utilitarian work is imbued should be observed. In normal sloppy evaluation of high cultural and social goods, contents are projected on proclaimed ‘objects’. This goes on, palpably, all the time. But is a content of venality projected on a (fake or) real structural object, and if so, how can a pseudo-content of a structuralist rigour be projected upon an object (a perceptibly venal object)? We’re looking for terms to locate or describe the ‘unreality’, venality (etc.) as properties of objects and practices rather than as attributes of individual people.

There is a qualitative analysis of the writings of fools and rogues. Can one, however, identify a quality of venery, anti-historicity, etc. in such writings without depending upon the prior identification of its author ‘X’ as (e.g.) a gouging, lying bastard whose writing can be expected to be a gouging, lying bastard’s bullshit? If we are going to discuss this matter analytically, we may have to consider the question of internal theoretical or dialectical complexity (or the lack of it) in bullshit. That is, we must consider the objectivity of the claim that something is bullshit (or worse) where it is intended that no reference (or restricted reference) need actually be made to the bullshitter. Obviously, these questions will signal some methodological shifts. The objectivity of the remark that ‘X is a bullshitter and must be stopped’ is, of course, nothing to do with the mere contemplation of bullshit (etc.). Historical method (dialectical method) will excoriate the fake accident (the virtual accident) of ideological self-contemplation, the sub-historicity of almost-businesslike pseudo-debate – oh well, back to a Jesuitical seriousness. Our remarks do not constitute an invitation to idealism, they just look like one.

Consider this: “The tendentiousness, gouging ..., etc. with which avant-garde ‘work’ (sic) is imbued can be observed – it is there in the crap. We can see how historical (and social) contents are projected upon objects and/or practices. By abstraction from such contents, we can form concepts such as historical meaninglessness, roguery, lying-ness, cheating venality, etc. By utilising such concepts, we can form propositions like, ‘This work is daft, this work is venal, and this supervenes or does not supervene other properties.”’ This may be daft prolixity; it’s not how one actually goes on; it’s entirely artificial. But let’s use it as a ground against which one can drive home the realisation that anxious cultural opiners rely upon the continued game of self-contemplation (etc.). This realisation is a methodological project – at least, it is the beginning of one.

A migraine follows the pieties of pratique: there is a necessary relation between ‘self-contemplation’ and ‘projection of contents upon objects’. ‘My mind’ is the content I ‘project’ upon that ‘object’ – which I invented. The foot is kept methodologically off the ground. Now, are there historical qualities in the same way that there are non-historical qualities such as greenness or flatness? We might make an inventory of possibly relevant circumstances. Consider:

i) ‘Thomas Pynchon and the Cooked and the Raw Photograph’ in October contains some ungrammatical English; and
ii) ‘Thomas Pynchon and the Cooked and the Raw Photograph’ is the ungrammatical snivelling pretension of a rat-like nobody.

What reasons does anyone have to be more suspicious of a (an historical) grammatical proposition like i) than of linguistic (you might say historical emotive?) propositions like ii)?

Someone might say that he thinks that the discriminatory suspicion in favour of i) is unreasonable. But someone else may say that these examples are by no means representative of the wide variety of historical, grammatical qualities (sic).

The question may appear to be this: in what sense is vagrant bullshit an objective property of “‘Thomas Pynchon and the Cooked and the Raw Photograph’ in October” that is, a simple property (as distinct from a complex property including the author, a snivelling, pretentious, rat-like nobody? But this isn’t the real question is it? A better version might be: ‘To what extent is the history of ideology (culture) an objective property of ideology’? This seems easy and almost tautologically answerable. Like the question: ‘To what extent does the historical method of culture comprehend the necessity of a correct partial identification of the space of cultural objects (and practices no doubt)?’ But this latter question leads to another: ‘Durham Cathedral is awesome’ is true, abbreviated and trivial, and in the right space (historically, etc.). But, ‘Durham Cathedral is brownish grey and n-feet high’ is true and trivial and in the wrong space historically. These ‘tendencies’ of spaces can be augmented and reversed, but the point is clear: historical space is determined by the order of analysis. There is a built-in priority ... the example above is trivial – anyone could think of a better one. The identification of that which supervenes depends upon correct partial identification of the space of cultural objects. We are now talking about legitimate reification. The above may be a way of saying that there are such things as offences the criticism of which entails stopping them. An obvious point is that history is modal. To complain and prevent, to intimidate, is to get rid of excess methodological baggage.

There is a need to ‘locate’ objects and practices grammatically in their proper ‘historical’ spaces. Wankers tend to confuse ungrammaticalness (in this sense) with complexity. Such confusion – proclaimed as ‘originality’ – is an old scandal of the avant garde. Technical pseudo-complexity tends to get confused with a critique of intensions. It is in this sense that sorting out the grammar can claim to be criticism and to imply simplification: pointing out that where (superficially apparent) intricacy can be shown to be just bad grammar (putting things in a variety of spaces, or having the object in one space and its ‘description’ in another), nobody is left in a position any longer to defend the meaningfulness or ‘basicness’ of what he’s said. We have here a strong definition of ‘superficiality’.

Method 3. 8.

There are those who make a way of life of ‘criticism in culture’.

To smart artists, compilers of would-be-trendy courses, gauchiste intellectuals, daft sociologists, conscience-stricken social anthropologists and others whom we are content to reify on the principle that there has to be some economical yet informal way of insulting at one stroke all those disposed to cram caps on their own heads, we are not saying either that they’re doing their ‘job’ badly (though they may well be), or that the ‘job’ is one which should not be done at all (though it may well be), but that the form of life which ‘the job’ serves to structure and instantiate, and which their performing of the job serves to entrench, is inherently offensive, unrealistic and unproductive. In such circumstances, to talk at all of ‘doing a job’ is to confuse intension with quotation and to further the process of mystification by means of which non-work has come to be promoted as a higher form of productivity. (This is not anti-intellectualism; we’re just pointing out that staring at the wall doesn’t mean contemplating the Sanderson William Morris.)

It is only by negating – or negativising – the real ground of relations of production that such a one can arrive at a positive self-image; i.e., at an image of himself as a positive productive figure. This is all pretty obvious.

Conversations with those whose interests are served by defining non-work as essentially productive are all of one kind: they are set in the mould of those conversations which the management has with itself. And when management speaks, nobody learns. An endless succession of ventriloquists’ dummies, each with the same hand up its back, they have nothing to say. They are involved in the perversion of history through confusion of the ‘spaces’ in which historical and cultural objects are located; e.g., by the pseudo-academic topicalisation of technique as a pretend form of critique of intensions. This is one way they can seem to be saying something. In fact their every utterance reduces to an expression of the fit between dynamic self-interest and effective historical unproductiveness proclaimed as a critical activity.

This is to say that their self-interest works as a thermostatic device, its real function the maintenance of an even temperature for social and cultural (sic) life in the face of macroscopic (‘material’ or ‘basic’) forces. They appear ‘internally’ as agents of change, but from outside the high-cultural living room their operations are seen as rigidly determined if they are visible at all. (And the latter viewpoint may presuppose a variety of scepticism rather than anything of a more exotic pink. It’s ‘scepticism’ (sort of) for US: we are dealing with an enormous monstrosity. These are its fools – its ideologic lumpens. Scepticism is the close companion of a sense of irony alive to its own dangers. Without it, they could drive you mad. Sceptical irony projects a non-scandalous reification.)

Given the predictability of conversation within the controlled environment, there seems little point in participating in debate, i.e., in pretending to be joining in the game of critique-according-to-the-rules. To do so would entail subscribing to similar fallacies about the nature of critique, entertaining matching fantasies about the prospects of a role as agent, and pursuing comparable ambitions to management status in a culture supposedly enlarged or transformed by our own pseudo-dialectic contributions. Intuitions of the ‘artificiality’, the ‘unreality’ or even the ‘extravagance’ (wastefulness) of life in the garden suburb of Modern Culture are ipso facto not subject to topicalisation in terms of the index of that culture. What we have to say does not have technical implications (though it may suggest strategies). So there’s no point in anyone getting beady-eyed. Intuition of differentness (intuition of actual social and historical complexity) is not to be drummed up out of an anxiety to be seen abroad in what-is-not-quite-the-latest-mode.

This should reassure no-one. We’re saying no more than that you can’t sort out the ambition to be historically realistic as you’d sort out an ambition to be a famous artist, or a famous art-linguist, or a professor of hanging-about-in-French or whatever. There’s a difference between being in a position to introduce certain items into your conversation and being in a position to mean what you say (where meaning is a function of being – en Français, or in some pathetic way à Paris).

As a modality, historical realism may lie somewhere between the structuralist system-builder’s compulsion to generalise and the self-contemplator’s compulsion to submit to leadership, authority. The complexity of the structuralist is a merely cutaneous intricacy; the complexity experienced by the self-contemplating bureaucrat is a mere function of occupational anxieties. ‘Generalisation’, ‘complexity’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘authority’ are strangely intervolved. An unrepugnant concept of authority is not to be established as a function of intellectual pattern-making; nor is it to be dreamed up out of the neuroses of those whose lives seem chaotic without it. Yet it may ultimately be authority of some sort – an authority which serves intuitions of actual social and historical complexity – that keeps the lid on the dustbin.

Method 3. 9.

It is not paradoxical to say that a social section may be subject to trivial alteration on the inclusion of a (further) dialectical abomination and yet stay the same. At the same time, the remark does not propose that nothing be done about that abomination.

The analysis that does not lose sight of the individual cannot be primarily concerned with who is talking pretentious nonsense since, to some extent, individuals are to be found in (or belonging to) identified and identifiable social sections. We have to think of awful, unelaborate pretensions as belonging to a reference class of some sort. We cannot even approach a collection of dialectical nonsense where each case or fragment is modally unique, or individuated as unique-for-analysis. Such individuation would not be realistic detail at all, but a significant abandonment of the remote possibility of practical meaning in the circumstances.

Criticism of the avant garde’s ‘theorising’ may on occasion look ‘internal’ or participatory. Consider, for example: “Avant-garde categories are so bad, so abominably bad, that they are not at all susceptible to internal or formal redemption.” We must find that inverting or re-ordering the categories is inappropriate and (also) illicit if the reference class of such ‘theory’ (‘fashion’) is found to be odious fiction. (How can you talk about – and what sort of state descriptions follow from – ‘National Endowment For The Arts concatenated somehow with “Cultural Information Foundation”’?) But it is important to remember that the logic and grammar of the avant-garde utterance is its potential illocutionary force. Its dialectical force is external, a function of the fact that its illocutionary ‘redescription’ is the analysis of its meaning. Apparently internal criticism will just be the detail in a critical search for anomaly of exception with respect to a defence of the general hypothesis that Jeremy Avant Garde cannot possibly mean what he says.

Avant-gardism has become the burgeoning hegemony of anti-historicism as only something which is objectifiable and not (theoretically, directly) capable of interpretation. It is not even as if the heavily manufactured nonsense, in relation to socialisations, etc., is complex in the short term; i.e., psychologically or logically. It can only prevent any sort of immanent form of problematic or complexity with respect to our practical compactness to it: (and) what (do) we do to get rid of/avoid the shit?

In the history of intensified avant-gardism, the appropriation of a family of models of ‘society and explanation’ is diagnostic – models whose teleological aspect is an educative ‘problematic’ where ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ share the same noetic space. Pious sloganising notwithstanding, the mechanistic extrapolation of society could only then be a ‘series’ of efficient causes in history strongly attached to the formalisation of intensionality – or to hagiography – or to ‘culture heroes’; and the slaves remain ... well, slaves, but uplifted slaves.

Venal opportunism has a theoretic supposition which remains with us as an ‘external’ consideration to historical analysis, yet it has a realisable (or predictable) future entailing that (e.g.) ‘John D. Rockefeller ought to read Michael Corris (or An Anti-Catalog)’ – cf. ‘Napoleon and Hegel’.

Why do the avant garde choose (e.g.) Authentic Paris Fashions? Art-art pseudo-journalism cannot take historical compactness and complexity as anything substantive, as it impersonates monotheoretic practice. It’s analytic that a monotheoretic view or a sense of a ‘single method’ (an idealisation of methodology, the preciousness of bourgeois rigour) will help (or is) one historically established hegemony or another, but it is even more radically meaningless when it emerges already reified as a means of appropriating utilities. We avoid relativism – liberal anti-ideology and logically unfeasible debates – through reification of that part of social relations, or ‘totality’, which is meaningless.

We have to deal with a lot of work which is much worse than revisionism. It is possible to talk about (or ‘with’) revisions insofar as they belong to the problem of practical projects, are part of the internal life of a class. The combination of daftness and treachery characteristic of the avant garde leads its critics to the funny but strongly defended position that ungrammatical debates are neither transparent nor opaque. That is, we find that a body of ‘work’, or a ‘waste’ of hearsay, has no immanent logicality, but is merely bound together by spurious convention. It is therefore very important to deny it any semantic functionality whatsoever.

The implications of a practical project in relation to some ‘work’ must be the suppression of that ‘work’ and not the expansion of an intensional world or a single world of isolated opinions. Demonstrating the defeasibility of Jeremy’s ‘piece’ or text will, at best, present a contradiction not just to ‘x’ but also to the claims ‘x’ and its family or ilk have in determining people’s intensional and ideological space. Perhaps the most we can say of the avant garde’s production is that its own criticism (in general) will display the most extreme or radical (sic) type-theoretical errors relative to the criticism of those who don’t pretend to speak the unspeakable language.

We are not attempting to justify a methodological tendency, but to deal with a very high degree of methodological principiation ‘expanding’ into ‘meaning’. An external (i.e., liberal-utilitarian) determination has no rigour. Perhaps it may be contrastive to, or superseded by rigour (meaning), but it is still brought about by practice and not ‘opinion’. Some ‘work’ has no substantial theoretical complexity although it may contribute to a complex problem. In ‘artistic’ marxism (etc.), the marxism has the status of company-mindedness or some other repulsive key to the staff (or executive) lavatory.